“I have a happy nature, / But Mother is always sad, / I enjoy every moment of my life, / – Mother has been had.” Saturday got you down? Here are a few brilliant little poems and their accompanying doodles by the late, great Stevie Smith.
Over the Frontier
The Artist of the Deal
“’I put lipstick on a pig,’ he said. ‘I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is’ … If he were writing The Art of the Deal today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, ‘The Sociopath.'” Donald Trump’s ghostwriter from The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, expresses some remorse and tells what it was like to write Trump.
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Compressed Madness
In a conversation from Upstairs at the Strand, Year in Reading alumnus Junot Díaz and Hilton Als discuss masculinity, science fiction, realism and truth, and representations of Latino culture. Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions interview with Díaz.
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A Letter from a Friend
Recommended Reading: Orrin Devinsky remembers his best friend, Oliver Sacks.
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Jon Cotner’s Island Night
How’s this sound: an eight-mile midnight stroll through Fire Island, replete with Socratic dialogue and references to Sappho, Pythagoras, Diogenes and Hippocrates? Such is exactly what you get from Island Night, the latest project of poet Jon Cotner (previously mentioned for his We’re Floating and Poem Forest projects). As the poet explains to the NY Times, his mission with the walks was to revive “the ancient and endangered practices of walking and talking.”
New Classics
The Slate staff compiled a list of “new classics” — “the most enduring” books, shows, movies, and ideas since 2000.